If you’ve been on the internet in the last 10 years, you’ve probably heard of LinkedIn. Who are we kidding, every professional probably uses it daily. And if you visited LinkedIn a couple of hours ago, then you received an error page.
Naturally, when a major website has an issue, we strive to identify the cause. Since we could still access LinkedIn’s external site, we were able to conclude that some DNS resolutions were answered correctly.
However, based on the errors received, we can only assume that this LinkedIn outage was related to an internal DNS resolution conflict. Websites often need to make several internal calls that require a DNS lookup that is not apparent to the end user—although, we won’t know the RFO until LinkedIn discloses what the issue was.
As you can see from the screenshots below, any internal DNS lookups that were done inside the LinkedIn application were unable to find their proper data sources.
According to Downdetector, user-reported outages peaked at over 25,920 and the outage started at around 12:45 PM PST. Connectivity seems to have been restored in some areas at around 2:15 PM PST, although there were some regions that continued to experience issues in relation to the outage. For instance, our colleagues in Europe were among those still affected until around 11:20 PM UTC.
This current situation really shines a light on the importance of enterprise DNS and how valuable it is— especially in 2021. The DNS Made Easy and Constellix network has specialized in DNS services since 2002. Advanced analytics, Multi-CDN services, and performance-monitoring solutions offer the highest uptime and the fastest performing speeds in the industry.
Outages don’t discriminate on domain size and can even hurt the big guys. We just wanted to relay how important DNS can be to everyone on the internet now and we wish LinkedIn the best in recovering from this issue.
